Friday, June 02, 2006

Black male college students have a sinister view of the world: I've noticed something very interesting in the classroom with black guys (at least the vocal ones). They are uniformly drawn to sinister views of the way the world works. All people are on the take. There isn't an honest person on the entire planet. Human motivation is universally greedy and exploitative. Conspiracy theories are the true ones. Jews have too much influence. Corruption is everywhere, and so you can hardly blame someone for unethical behavior. This doesn't appear to be the result of what is learned in class because there is no pattern of this among other students who take basically the same classes (most of my students are social science majors). I don't see the same pattern among black females. And in my experience, this is not just a noticeable tendency: no talkative black guy has ever communicated a different view.

13 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Came to a similar conclusion several years ago when Bill Cosby was saying there may be something to the theory that AIDS is the result of doctors infecting people. If >Cosby< can think that way, conspiracy theories must be widespread among blacks.

The Big Five personality trait called "Agreeableness" measures individual differences in how cooperative & trusting people are, where Disagreeable people are more antagonistic and suspicious of others' motives. This trait shows the largest sex diff cross-culturally, where men are more Disagreeable -- so that's why the effect is so stark b/w black men & women.

Anecdotally, and I say this w/o academic data (though could look into it), blacks are more Disagreeable than whites, who are in turn more Disagreeable than East Asians (obeying Rushton's Rule).

Still, cultural factors are surely at work -- ideological whackos, encouragement to complain when life isn't fair & to blame whites, and so on. What's striking is that if young black males tried to blame someone else when accounting to their own parents, they'd get an extra hard whoopin' for trying to weasel out of responsibility. But they -- correctly -- view whites as wimps (though they're aware that Jews, as an ethnic minority, will bite back), so they see how far they can push the envelope.

Not that whites don't believe in a lotta nutty stuff, but the AIDS thing is bananas.

Agreeing with what Agnostic says, but the effect may be aggravated by the slight IQ difference between black men and women. The former score 1-2 points less than the latter - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/12/do-black-women-have-higher-iqs-than.html On a related note, I've read of a surplus of professional black women in desperate search of similar black men.

Agnostic, agreeableness is distinct from tolerance for other races? According to McDonald (I've read very little of his), Whites are the most tolerant of other races.

I remember a real clip from Larry Elder's show, where a black doctor tried to convince his black patient to take a pill. Upon the patient's refusal, the doctor told him how it was a way to get back at the White man, by living off social security longer.

College affirmative action/positive discrimination policies mean that in the USA there is a big gap between the average ability of black & white students. While the cognitive ability gap across the whole US population is around 1 standard deviation, according to Murray in many universities it is more like 2 SD. If you are a typical black student at one of these universities, you are not going to do well compared to your peers, _no matter how hard you try_. This creates a strong incentive to accept conspiracy theories as the explanation for why you can't succeed, and indeed AA _is_ a conspiracy of sorts. In an institution that selects on merit like the US army, there is little difference in average ability between white and black members, a black soldier can do as well as a white. When hard work results in success, there is much less incentive to believe in conspiracies of oppression, and race relations in the US army are one of the very few success stories in American race relations.

When you and what you know you will grow into like it or not (little black boys into grown black men) are viewed by society at large as sinister, you yourself begin to believe it and this colors your perception of the world. Black boys and men are feared. Black girls and women, (though they may make many uncomfortable just by their physical presence), are not. Basic psychology. This blog and the people commenting is full of ignorantand racist sentiments. Pretty depressing but thanks for some good fodder for my psychology paper.

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